A MOST AGREEABLE PASTIME
Video Games, Victorian Style
Tag: Video Games
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I picked up Weapon Shop de Omasse for a pittance in a Nintendo eShop sale a few months back, and I’ve dipped into it a few times over the past few months. It’s the perfect example of a game with a winning idea that’s let down by poor execution. The set up is that you’re…
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The big gaming news this week was that Nintendo are going to start making games for smartphones in coordination with the mobile games company DeNA. Speculation has been rife, and many have been pointing to DeNA’s reliance on free-to-play games as a worrying sign of things to come. Want to play as Super Mario? Pay…
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This post contains major spoilers for Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead: Season 1. Episode 3 of Michael Palin’s seminal travel adventure series, Around the World in 80 Days, makes for some of the most compelling television ever put to air. In his bid to follow in Phileas Fogg’s footsteps, as told in the Jules Verne…
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We’ve known for a long time that gaming is no longer the preserve of sweaty, bedroom-bound teenage males (if indeed it ever was). But I was intrigued to read this article on Kotaku UK about just how much the gaming demographic has changed over the years. This was probably the most interesting part for me:…
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I found myself replaying 2011’s Mortal Kombat the other day. Not because I wanted to relive some sort of crazy bloodlust, not because I wanted to hear Scorpion’s “Get Over Here!” one more time before the new game, not even because I wanted to get myself hyped for what I think is one of the…
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My first impressions of Heavy Rain weren’t great. After a protracted installation session, I was wholly underwhelmed by the game’s glacier-slow and mind-numbingly tedious opening (see earlier post). However, Sir Gaulian assured me that the game picks up, and I’m glad I stuck with it. For a start, it’s a film noir thriller, and I’m…
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The following contains spoilers of Far Cry 4’s plot. Amidst the civil war raging in Kyrat is a more subtle but just as important war, one where tradition is being pitted against progress. On the surface it is a war of ideals. The people of Kyrat’s resistance, the Golden Path, isn’t just at war with…
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The following may contain mild spoilers of Far Cry 4’s plot. For the hypersensitive, consider yourself warned. I grew up in a very unreligious household. There was no anti-religious sentiment – after all I was only a generation removed from the anglo-christian upbringing of my grandparents in Europe – but there was certainly a dearth…
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I’ll never forget the summer of 2006-07. I remember day after day of 40 degree weather making it impossible to keep cool. I remember sleepless nights tossing and turning in a loft apartment that practically transformed into an oven throughout the course of the day. I remember my first Christmas away from home and eating…
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On Burnout Paradise – how Criterion Games’ opus perfected the art of letting players pissfart around
With the way people talk about open world ‘sandbox’ games, you’d think the designers had taken the afternoon off and forgotten to design half the game, under the guise of creating an ‘unguided experience’. They’re written about as if players were left to their own devices, free to do whatever they want without constraint, free…
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Nazis, robots, alternative timelines – on paper, Wolfenstein: The New Order (buy on Amazon) sounds like the sort of straight-to-video B-movie nonsense you’d bypass with a tired shake of the head were you to spot it in a video shop (if such places even exist any more). Yet it manages to be, as Sir Gaulian…
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While playing games our own little legends are born. The stories we form in our heads, the narratives we create to put context to what’s happening on screen, they always go on to become things of legend that tell our own personal tale of time spent with a game. In many ways it’s this imagined…
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In the very early days of video games they were primarily aimed at teaching the player how to progress. Improvement was a key driver of early arcade games, incentivised both through the per play pricing structure of the machines, and the most basic of desires to be the best by appearing on the high score…
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What ho, chums! So no doubt you’ve already heard the news by now: Club Nintendo is to close later this year, which will be very sad news for fans of free tat. Perhaps ‘tat’ is being a bit harsh, but there’s no denying the fact that the stuff being hoiked through the UK site is…
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Being a migrant-built country founded by Brits and living in a city made home by a wave of Italians and Germans, it isn’t surprising that Football of the soccer variety came naturally to plenty of kids at my school in Australia. While Adelaide is a city in love with its Aussie Rules football, for a…
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Bats and Balls. That’s where the similarities end. I grew up on a healthy diet of cricket. Sport is so entrenched in Australian culture that it’s kind of hard to escape, with backyard cricket an afternoon and family gathering staple, and television programming and ratings being quite literally dictated by what sports are on the…
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If you’ve ever sifted through the pre-owned section of your local games store, or scrolled through the seemingly endless video game listings on ebay, you know just how little value we as people place on old sports games. Every year like clockwork, developers and publishers push out a new version of their sports simulator, while…
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The next wave of amiibos is released today, and look what was waiting for me in the post box… Ike will now be joining Marth on the fireplace as my collection of Fire Emblem-related amiibos grows steadily larger. I’ve pre-ordered Lucina and Robin too (although they won’t be out until April), and I’m hoping that…
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I’ve just finished Alien: Isolation, and I’m almost glad. On the plus side, it hopefully means an end to the xenomorph-related nightmares and the dangerously high heart rates I’ve experienced while playing the game. On the other hand, it’s one of the best things I’ve played in years, and I’m very, very sad it’s over.…
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Having played video games from a very early age, it was inevitable that they’d somehow influence the person I’d become. But while the pre-classification world I grew up in was concerned about the impacts of violence, of sex, or of staring at a screen for hours on end, it has influenced my personality in a…
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All this excitement over the launch of the new 3DS in the UK has put me in mind of those fantastic Japanese adverts that came out last October. For the launch of the new 3DS in Japan, Nintendo brought in Japanese pop singer Kyary Pamyu Pamyu and created the most colourful, upbeat advert I’ve ever…
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What ho, chums! After struggling to enjoy Assassin’s Creed III, I finally decided to permanently shelve the game this week. It’s not often that I’ll leave a game unfinished – I hate abandoning things halfway through, and the same goes for TV series, books and pretty much anything really. So that gives you an indication…
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I’ve been intrigued by the reviews of Assassin’s Creed: Rogue. Although it was brought out in the shadow of its bigger, next-gen only brother – Assassin’s Creed: Unity – most reviewers agree it outshines its graphically superior sibling in terms of gameplay. And certainly, its bonkers mix of narwhal hunting and assassinating assassins looks like…
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I just finished playing Another World: 20th Anniversary Edition on the 3DS, which was a bargain in the Nintendo eShop at £3.49. I remember when the original game came out on the Amiga in 1991: the cinematic graphics were mind-blowing at the time. Unfortunately, I never had a chance to play it back in the…
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What ho, chums! As we hurtle down the final furlong of the year, I for one will be grateful for the powerful respite offered by the festive season. The past few months have seen unending turmoil, mostly thanks to my relocation from London to “The McManor” in beautiful Edinburgh. This tumult has been combined with…
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I got my first Amiibo this week, and just look how happy it made me. Gosh darn they’re charming little things, aren’t they? Like me, you may have been pondering whether to buy one of these little figurines. Like me, you may have been reasoning to yourself that they’re quite expensive for little lumps of…
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Blimey, is it that time of year already? 2014 has flown by for me, mostly thanks to lots of travelling and working in various places, culminating in a move from London to Edinburgh at the end of the year. All that to-ing and fro-ing left me with very little time to play this year’s video…
A MOST AGREEABLE PASTIME 